Category Archives: Artists Interviews

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Rachel Mouawad

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Rachel Mouawad, and i am currently an animator at Caustik studios in Beirut, Lebanon.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
The only jobs i’ve had are in the animation industry, so i don’t really have any crazier job experiences yet!!

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
I have worked on many inspiring projects that i’m very proud to have been a part of, but my favorite so far would have to be my final film InsideOut. This was done during my year at Vancouver Film School in the Classical Animation program where I was introduced to many great artists and teachers which made the project so much more interesting to me. Working with such a great group of talent is truly a life changing experience, to say the least.

 

How did you become interested in animation?
My interest in animation started at a very young age watching cartoons such as Warner Bros, Hanna-barbera, and of course the Disney classics. It grew stronger when i started to discover how these cartoons were actually made. I found myself compelled and Continue reading

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Lincoln Adams

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Freelance Story Artist and Visiting Professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I’ve never had any really crazy jobs because they’ve all been centered around art in one way or another. But I’ve had art jobs that seemed crazy because I was desperate and needed to feed my family. Spending hours on end doing photo retouch for a down and out wedding photographer only to barely make minimum wage comes to mind…

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
Every show I get to work on is one I take pride in being part of. Getting paid to draw pictures and tell stories all day while taking care of my family is a privilege and a blessing! But one of the projects that I feel was the most rewarding wasn’t a client job. It was helping to create a multi-media limited animation for my church a few years ago—A stage size picture book where scrims doubled as snow covered rolling hills and movie screens that had the animatic projected onto them. The story process was much like the Pixar process. We had nothing more than a premise that we formed through improv until it rapidly congealed into a script. And when we coupled that with an original score and live music in between each Act it became a very powerful message. We came together as a group with such wide ranging abilities and developed a meaningful original story that spoke to over 5000 people in one weekend. I was very fortunate to be used by God and to blend so quickly with a handful of creatives in such a short time. Humbling, to be honest…

Where are you from and how did you get into the animation business?
I’m from the Northeast Ohio area and I spent the first 12 years of my career working as a freelance illustrator for magazines and because that market was so Continue reading

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Rick Hill

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What is your name and your current occupation?
 My name is Rick Hill and I’m a freelance Art Director / Character Designer in the Atlanta area.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Well I’ve spent the last 15 years working as an Art Director in the advertising industry. But before that I was a fabric cutter at a warehouse, an assembly line order picker at another warehouse and a pizza maker at Pizza Hut. That’s just a few. ha!

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
 When I worked at Mullen (ad shop in Boston) I worked on the launch of Gametap.com with Turner. I got the chance to pitch and sell an original cartoon called Lame Games. It was an online video game cartoon series. I designed the cast of characters that ranged from 8bit to 128 bit. That was my first real taste of working on character design. Which is strange if you work in advertising. A good strange if you ask me. Another fun project was working on Baskin Robbins Ice Cream. It was another situation where my writer and I pitched character driven work and it sold. We worked with the talent folks at Nathan Love in NYC on the 3D characters and the animation.

 

How did you become interested in animation?
 I’ve been interested in animation my whole life. I can’t believe Continue reading

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José Alves da Silva

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What is your name and your current occupation?
I am José Alves da Silva and I am a freelance character artist/modeller.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I didn’t have any crazy jobs. However I have a degree in architecture and I have worked in the architecture visualization field for many years before dedicating myself to characters.

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
As part of my work I had the opportunity to write several articles/tutorials for magazines like 3D Artist and 3DCreative. These magazines give me a lot of freedom regarding the images I produce, so they end up being very personal. I enjoy this creative freedom a lot and I think that I have produced some of my best characters for these magazines. Among these are the Boxing Kangaroo, the Barrio Guy, General Rhino and Lil’B, for example.  I am also involved in the creation of sculptures for collectible figures and model kits. I am very proud of some of these characters, like the Cello Girl and Sasha, the welder girl.

How did you become interested in animation?
Even though I am not an animator, we all have to agree that animation is a kind of magic. As many people, Disney films had a huge impact on me. Seeing these characters come to life is just.. Continue reading

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Pablo Navarro

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What is your name and your current occupation?
My name is Pablo Navarro; I’m an Animation Director and Senior Character Animator.  Right now I’m animating for the movie titled “The Congress”, the next project from Ari Foldman, director of Waltz with Bashir.  Besides that I teach animation as a part time job, and I do tutoring to students here in Barcelona and other cities of Spain.  Also I give lectures and conferences about animation and acting around the globe.

 

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
Well, I work since I’m 8 years old, I used to work on orange and watermelon plantations helping loading the trucks, after that I was a waiter for many years in the family restaurant……although I am a formerly electro-mechanic technician, I never worked as such, I jump into animation right after finishing my studies.I wasn’t fond of those other activities to continue with them 😉  Don’t know if they’re crazy enough jobs…..but surely they don’t have anything to do with animation.

 

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
The project I am most proud it is a movie called Nocturna. That is my favorite project so far.  I really enjoy working with the same Directors of that movie (Adria Garcia and Victor Maldonado plus Alfredo Torres), they create a studio called Headless and I collaborate with them often for new projects and development.

How did you become interested in animation?
Well, I think that all my life I was interested in animation, but when you’re a kid it is difficult to find out, or to put it into words like say “I want to be an animator!!”  My mother found out that the only way to keep me quiet and not doing too much trouble around the house was giving me a paper and a pencil and I could Continue reading

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Ron Doucet

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What is your name and your current occupation?
Ron Doucet, Animation Director.

What are some of the crazier jobs you had before getting into animation?
I harvested fish eggs for a couple summers when I was a teenager. Thousands of fish come in on a water-fed conveyor belt, you grab the females, slice open their bellies, remove the sack of eggs, slap them in a box, and repeat a million times. Not so much crazy… but incredibly boring.

What are some of your favorite projects you’re proud to have been a part of?
So far I have a few.  The very frist production I ever directed holds a special place in my heart because we had so much creative freedom, the series was Olliver’s Adventures, a little cartoon that aired on Canadian and Australian television from 2002-2006.  It was a lot of fun to produce, the crew turned out to be a well-oiled machine by the 3rd season, and we were creating our own stories and scenarios and having a blast doing it.  I made an independant short film back in 2005. Me and a few others got together for a few weeks to create it, it was fun and spontaneous, and even though it was brief and made with no budget, it was pure fun.  Another cool one was the MSTRKRFT music video for the track ‘Work On You’ I sort of played the roll of Producer and FX Supervisor for it. Again, the enjoyment came from plenty of creative freedom, from developing a story, designing characters, to animating the whole thing. We were pressed for time (as always), but had lots of laughs creating it. The only direction the client gave us was “Make it feel like Astroboy, transformers and Akira.” — we were in heaven.

How did you become interested in animation? 
My parents say I was drawing since the age of 2. But as far back as I can remember I was always drawing the cartoons that I’d see on TV. I had a chalkboard when I was 8 years old, and I’d draw scenes as Continue reading